


Stay out of the way and compliment the chef.

by werepope (quiteparadise)



Series: 2014 Advent Calendar for a Filthy-Minded Athiest [20]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 14:44:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2815898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiteparadise/pseuds/werepope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Payne family vacation, featuring Zayn.</p><p>AU: Who am I to blow against the wind?</p><p> </p><p>Advent calendar challenge: Cooking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stay out of the way and compliment the chef.

Liam sheds his wetsuit like a second skin in the spray of the outdoor shower, stays under the cool water until he can no longer feel the grit of sand in his hair or between his toes. He skin feels tight after sloughing off the layer of brine and sweat he'd worked up while falling off of his surfboard, but the sun bakes him warm again in the walk across the sprawling white concrete deck and into the house.

He follows the sound of his own voice to the kitchen.

They agreed before they came here that they would cook, and it still confounds Liam a little. The villa comes with a professional grade kitchen, it's heavy-duty stainless appliances gleaming dully, but it also came with a chef. Karen had argued that it was better this way, though. They'd spend more time together. Spend time with people who they might not get quality time with otherwise. So they jumbled their names together in a bowl and Geoff drew them out in twos. Each pair would cook one night of their stay, with Karen agreeing to pull double duty with the odd person out.

It was familial, Karen had said. And Liam had caved because he was a soft touch anyway, but maybe an especially soft touch with that word being dropped. Familial. Jesus. He's such a sucker.

Karen is wet up to the elbow as she washes dishes in the bathtub of a sink while Zayn stands at the peninsula, chopping. The tap tap tap of the knife striking the plastic cutting board is in time with the beat of the song. The shift of muscle in Zayn's arm as he cuts is– Well. Liam has clocked about a hundred solid hours watching cookery shows in high definition on hotel televisions across the world, seeking the white noise of congenial voices on low volume to sooth him out of his own overactive head. In all that time, he has never once been turned on by knife skills before.

It's the bareness of Zayn's arms in his snug black tank top, Liam thinks. Like Victorian gentlemen getting aroused by glimpses of ankle and wrist. Like the vulnerability of a bare throat after only seeing a man in high collared shirts and ties. Civil nudity. It's a marvel.

There is a cordless speaker on the peninsula playing Liam's debut album at an embarrassing volume. Embarrassing for Liam, that is. Neither Karen nor Zayn have any shame whatsoever. They rather glare at him when he turns the volume down.

"We're listening to that," Karen objects, blindly turning off the faucet with her elbow.

Liam leans his elbows against the bar height counter and rolls his eyes. He doesn't quite contain his grin. "You're horrible."

Karen wipes a bowl dry before handing it over to Zayn, who flashes her a smile of thanks and says: "It's a good album."

"It's our favorite," Karen says. "You were so adorable."

Zayn's shoulders hunch up a little when he laughs. "You were pretty cute."

Liam picks up a piece of carrot and throws it at him. It hits his shoulder at an angle and bounces onto the floor. Liam likes the sweet, mischievous smile Zayn gives him so much, he does it again.

"Someone just volunteered for cleanup duty," Zayn says, sweeping the carrot into the bowl with a practiced swipe of his knife.

Liam never could have imagined him like this when they met, in the long months before they started dating. Zayn was so frustratingly opaque back then. He could give Liam so much of himself, long conversations full of tidy little anecdotes that passed as history when bundled up together – vignettes that added up to a more elaborate story. But his daily life had seemed so off limits. Guarded. A precious secret or a skeleton in the closet. Liam hadn't realized until much later how much of a skeleton. How much of a closet.

Now Liam knows these things, too. His deftness with a knife is from taking cooking classes a few years after he had moved to LA from London – Zayn's mother is a wonderful cook but she never taught him, and he'd survived by eating out until being on network TV and therefore recognizable made that too much of a hassle. The way he pulls his hair back is vanity just as much as practicality – Zayn knows how beautiful he is, knows that it's his bread and butter. He glances at himself in just about every mirror he passes, because being unaware of his appearance is anathema to a man who's career was founded on his attractiveness.

Zayn tosses the contents of the bowl, a graceful little arc of diced veg, and Liam thinks that they're not even comparable, this Zayn and the one he used to know. And maybe this is all the surface stuff, the kind of thing you'd learn about him through a telescopic lens pointed at his modern, glass and stucco house in Malibu. But Zayn he lives in a gated community – no one sees these things unless he wants them to.

"Whatcha makin'?" Liam asks, as Zayn goes to the fridge and swaps out his carefully julienned vegetables for– "Is that an _octopus_?"

Karen giggles a kind of disgusted delight. They probably already went through this at the store. "It's so slimy!"

It's obvious that Zayn learned to cook in the wealthy hills of LA, where anything frozen or store-bought is bad for you. Where the exotic has been rendered so carefully commonplace. Where you could learn to prepare an octopus in a cooking class. Jesus.

Liam leans forward over the bar to get a better look, leaning his weight onto his folded arms. Zayn grins, and Liam likes that he's showing off a bit. Zayn played an extrovert on TV for six years, but it didn't exactly rub off on him. It's not easy for him to function under this kind of casual attention. It's so amazingly gratifying to see him be himself here, in this rented house full of Liam's family. So heart-bursting and relieving.

"Squeamish, babe?" Zayn asks as he manhandles the curly bundle of tentacles, pushing with his thumbs until something hard pokes out of the center of the flesh.

Liam hops back from the counter, his voice bobbing in time with his feet. "Ew-ew-ew!"

Karen laughs. Zayn threatens to throw part of the octopus at him.

"What was that!?"

"The beak," Zayn says, tossing it in the trash, possibly in the hopes of Liam returning. But there's no way he's going to be able to eat that if he sees any more of this grisly process.

"Nope. No way. I'm out. You're mad. And I'm taking me with me." He dashes in close again to swipe the little portable speaker. "We shouldn't have to see this."

He dances backwards out of the room, the old ridiculous moves coming back easy enough after all these years, all those shows. He drowns out their laughing protests by turning up the volume and harmonizing with himself through one of his first radio hits:

" _It's everything about you, you, you. Everything that you do, do, do,_ " he sings, winking and pointing at Zayn, who feigns a swoon.


End file.
